Dota 2 surpasses Skyrim’s record for most concurrent players on Steam
The Dragonborn is no longer the most popular kid on the block. All the cool kids are into defending the ancients.
Valve’s Dota 2 strategy game just broke The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s record for the most concurrent players on the Steam gaming network. Dota 2 reached 297,010 simultaneous gamers on March 2. That beats Skyrim’s 287,411 players on the game’s launch day in November 2011.
Dota 2 is Valve’s entry in the popular multiplayer online battle arena genre. Other popular examples include League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, and Guardians of Middle-earth. These games continue to grow in popularity largely due to huge presence in the competitive gaming scene.
In August, Valve held a Dota 2 tournament with a $1.6 million prize pool. Events like these are clearly replacing traditional marketing budgets, and it’s obviously working. You can see in the above chart that Dota 2 is growing rapidly.
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